"Hello, Charlie!" said the grinning manager, and to his sister, "Surely
you haven't forgotten Captain Martin, Helen?"
In the brief moments that followed Helen Ward knew that she had reached
the point toward which she had felt herself moving for several
months--impelled by strange forces beyond her comprehension.
Her brother's renewed and firmly established friendship with this
playmate of their childhood years, together with the many stirring
tales that John had told of his comrade captain's life in France, could
not but awaken her interest in the boy lover whom she had, as she
believed, so successfully forgotten. The puzzling change in her
brother's life interests, has neglect of so many of his pre-war
associates and his persistent comradeship with his fellow workman, had
kept alive that interest; while Captain Martin's repeated refusals to
accept John's invitations to the big home on the hill had curiously
touched her woman's pride and at the same time had compelled her
respect.
The clash between John's new industrial and social convictions and the
class consciousness to which she had been so carefully schooled, with
its background of her father's wretched mental condition, the
unhappiness of her home and her own repeated failures to find
contentment in the privileges of material wealth, raised in her mind
questions which she had never before faced.
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